[Tlhingan-hol] 19 new words to create

[Will Martin]

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lojmIt tI'wI'nuv



> On Jan 7, 2016, at 2:48 AM, Jesse Manoogian <boyfromtheabyss at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> >De’vID:

> >Andrew:
> >> I have a few conlangs I would like to learn several years down the road >when
> >> I have the time to study them and their vocabularies have grown to a size
> >> that makes them usable in daily life (Klingon has gotten much better in >this
> >> regard . . . when D'Armond Speers tried to teach his son the language, >much
> >> was made out of the fact that Klingon lacked a word for "table").
> >
> >Klingon was already usable in daily conversation before then. I met
> >D'Armond many years ago (this was before his son was born, I believe)
> >and we were at a shopping mall together, during part of which time we
> >conversed entirely in Klingon. Yes, we did have to use circumlocutions
> >and spent a lot of time pointing to things and explaining ad hoc
> >vocabulary to each other at first, but once we got going we could
> >converse fairly well.
> 
> Wow, David, I am impressed!

At an early qep’a’ Qov, who had taken the pledge and refused to say anything except in Klingon, started a very emotional conversation with Seqram and myself in which she chided herself for not doing enough to promote the language for beginners. I had the smallest part of the conversation, but it went the full range of expressing tearful shame, helpful reassurance, discussing options for what to try next, and expressions of respect for all she had already done for the group…

All without a single word that wasn’t already in the Klingon vocabulary.

For people who are well skilled and practiced, like Qov, Seqram, Qanqor and others, there’s no question as to whether or not this is a useful language. It doesn’t have the vocabulary of a natural language that has developed over many centuries with the influence of a world of other languages at the borders, but it does have a remarkable range of expressive capabilities.

Expanding the vocabulary is an arbitrary patchwork project. If the language lacked sufficient grammar and vocabulary for a wide range of communication, there would have been a lot more complaining than there has been. The impressive thing about Klingon to me is that one guy spent a remarkably short time creating the skeleton that has been fleshed out over the past decades with very little to add to what it started with.

It’s not like it’s something broken that needs fixing and tossing in 19 more words is going to make a huge difference. Great. You noticed that we don’t have a word for “blond”. How many blonde Klingons have we seen? It could very well be that they don’t HAVE a word for blond because on Qo’noS there aren’t any people or animals with that color of hair.

As was often been pointed out (humorously) we didn't have a word for “umbrella”. Well, Okrand needed a word for that for one of the several translation projects he participated in, so now we have a word for “umbrella”. Does that really advance the language that much?

If we just count words, then we are dealing with a language with very roughly 3,000 words, depending on what you want to call a distinct word. Compare that to English, where fairly normal people are supposed to know 100,000 words. If growing the vocabulary is the one thing we need to do, then we need a lot more than 19 words.

Consider the new book “Thing Explainer” by Randall Munroe, written using only the 1,000 most commonly used words in the English language. He restricted himself to scarcely more than a third of the Klingon vocabulary and he describes the Saturn 5 rocket, Mars landers, nuclear power plants, human anatomy, living cells, geological formations, kitchen appliances, aircraft, chemistry...

We work with the vocabulary we have. When we get more words, we add them to our dictionaries and move on.

I’m surprised we aren’t asking for more affixes. Mostly, people casually exploring the language look for nouns, don’t find the one they are looking for and they ask us to add them. Like we do that. And like that’s all we need to make the language magically more useful to everyone.

The only way you can really tell what the language most essentially needs is to use it. Talking about it doesn’t really teach you as much.

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